17

Possible Duplicate:
How Can I Know Whether I Am a Good Programmer?

As many programmers I have worked in several languages. While of course there are some that I am more at ease than other, I do not have a real way to precisely measure my skill in a specific language.

So I thought of a system which allows me to help me with that. I am looking for 5 common criteria in programming languages, to which I will have a value from 1 (junior) to 4 ( Senior) to represent my skill.

I however have no real idea of the criteria I should choose for that.

Does anybody have suggestion ?

Thanks.

Community
  • 1
lollancf37
  • 281

4 Answers4

15

Take a look at the Programmer's competency matrix. It's a good all-around measure of skill, more or less.

Bruce Alderson
  • 974
9

I can't imagine of a system that will allow to measure someone's skills definitely even for a particular programming language. What may you need it for? Data structures and algorithms are common, and it takes half an hour to find the appropriate data structure implementation in the standard libraries (not always true, of course). So if you know what is a linked-list, you will probably use it correctly.

Moreover, criteria depend on the language, and cannot be common. Some programming languages provide more freedom to do everything you want (to shoot yourself in the foot) and some of them set boundaries you cannot go out from. So criteria vary from language to language.

If I need a developer to work on a web-service I want to implement using Java, I will probably hire someone who has built a complex system using django (Python) than someone how knows Java but have no experience on web-services. So here I measure the knowledge in a particular domain, not a programming language, because for this task I consider the domain knowledge more important than the implementation language.

duros
  • 2,444
2

The ability to read and understand any (reasonably well written) code in that language is the most important criterion to measure mastership.

The ability to write code to solve any problem doesn't say much; just consider a C programmer who claims the ability to write C++. Since C is more-or-less a subset of C++, the C programmer can solve any problem by writing an appropriate C program and using the C++-compiler to compile it, so technically it's C++. Likewise, many programer learn just enough of a new language so they can apply the old idioms. You can write FORTRAN in any language.

By the same argument, LOC/hour says nothing. A programmer who writes Perl programs that look like C programs probably generates more LOC/hour than a Perl programmer who writes idiomatic Perl code.

user281377
  • 28,434
1

If you can do all Project Euler problems correctly in language X, I would consider you to be an expert in language X.